חוק מימון מפלגות (תיקון מס' 35), התשע"ז-2017Law of Party Financing (Amendment No. 35), 2017 · automatic translation · suggest a correction

Official summary of the law (Knesset)

The purpose of the law is to prevent the circumvention of the restrictions imposed by the Parties Financing Law on parties and factions and bodies connected to them. To this end, the law imposes restrictions on a person or body carrying out "election activity," which is one of four types of activities specified in the law, including creating a database of voting intentions, transporting voters, and publishing propaganda for a particular party, in significant amounts. Anyone who carries out election activity or raises donations for this purpose in an amount of 100,000 NIS will be required to register with the State Comptroller, keep accounts in accordance with his instructions, and submit a report to him on the accounting system. Anyone who carries out election activity or raises donations in an amount of 400,000 NIS or more will also be required to incorporate as an association or public benefit company. The law also imposes a limit on the amount of donations that a body active in elections is permitted to receive, and establishes that if donations are received from abroad, the body may not raise more than 600,000 NIS in total. To ensure compliance with the provisions of the law, the law grants the State Comptroller the authority to fine persons and bodies active in elections who violated the provisions of the law, and authorizes the chairman of the Central Elections Committee to issue injunctions. Additional matters regulated by the law are the increase of the ongoing financing paid to factions in the Knesset each month, such that instead of 5% of a financing unit per mandate, 6% of a financing unit will be paid, and the possibility for a faction in the Knesset to lend money to a faction connected to it in the General Federation of Labor (Histadrut). The law further establishes that the financing unit and the other amounts specified in the law will be updated on 1 January of each year, linked to the rise in the index.

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Sponsors

Yoav Kisch, Nava Boker, Amir Ohana, David Bitan

What was said in the plenum

The law regulates and restricts fundraising and activity of "bodies active in elections" (that are not parties) through reporting obligations, donation caps, and a ban on receiving large amounts of external funding, with the aim of preventing circumvention of party financing laws; the debate revolved mainly around the 2015 V15 affair, around the question of whether the real purpose is transparency and limiting big money in elections or suppressing the expression and activity of opponents of the government, and in this context the issue of the different treatment of the newspaper "Israel Hayom" was also raised.

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An automatic summary of the plenum transcripts: the debate on the bill at every reading it was voted on. Arguments are given as the speakers made them; this is not an assessment. The list of speakers comes from the transcript, without a model. Transcripts of the sittings: 1, 2 · write to the author

Reservations to the second reading

84 reservations were filed: proposed changes to the text the committee brought to the second and third reading.

The reservations are mainly intended to narrow or cancel the definition of "election activity" and "body active in elections" and the registration, reporting and penalty obligations attached to them, to change the financial threshold amounts and fine rates, and to postpone the law's effective date; some of the reservations also sought to expand donation restrictions on factions, parties and candidates.

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By faction

• Joint List opposition · 81 reservations · 12 members
• Meretz opposition · 81 reservations · 5 members
• Zionist Union opposition · 32 reservations · 24 members
• Jewish Home coalition · 2 reservations · 1 member
• Likud coalition · 2 reservations · 1 member

A joint reservation counts for every faction whose members filed it.

Asked to speak: Yael German (Yesh Atid), Uri Maklev (United Torah Judaism), Aliza Lavie (Yesh Atid), Israel Eichler (United Torah Judaism)

Proposers and reservation numbers are extracted automatically from the committee version, and the count is checked against the numbers printed in it. The descriptions are an automatic summary. The reservation numbers in this document cannot be read as text, so the count was not checked against it automatically. Committee version for the second and third reading (PDF) · write to the author